INSTALLATION VIEW I Miss You More Than I Remember You, Tjaden Gallery, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 2025.
ARTWORK Taken From Above (S-21), 2025. Screenprint on dyed silk, sewn synthetic fabric, grommets, pinewood, wooden dowel, concrete deck block, 48 x 58 x 8 inches.
INSTALLATION VIEW I Miss You More Than I Remember You, Tjaden Gallery, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 2025.
ARTWORK Elsewhere, 2025. Screenprint on synthetic dyed fabric with sewn strips purchased in Phnom Penh, pinewood, wooden dowel, concrete deck block, 48 x 58 x 8 inches.
INSTALLATION VIEW I Miss You More Than I Remember You, Tjaden Gallery, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 2025.
ARTWORK Fragments, 2025. 9-channel video (color, sound; 9min 24sec), strip boards, cement, thread, cables, electronic hardware, approx. 60 × 42.5 × 3 inches.
DETAIL Fragments, 2025.
នឹកដូចក្តីស្រមៃលើសអ្វីដែលនៅនឹកឃើញ
Tjaden Gallery, Cornell University (Ithaca, NY)
MFA Thesis Exhibition
April 14 – 19, 2025.
(Poster) (Credits)
I Miss You More Than I Remember You is an invocation of memory and longing, unfolding as a sensuous installation that “doubles” as a funerary procession. International remembrance observing fifty years since the Cambodian genocide on April 17, 1975, reignited discourse over narratives of historical trauma, diasporic memory, and U.S. militarism in mainland Southeast Asia.
Reflecting on personal and familial experiences of displacement and resettlement, I reframe the temporal and atmospheric poetics of Theravāda Buddhism to analogize the spatial sociality of Cambodian American refugees as stuck between “insider” and “outsider.” I posit this spatial intervention as counter-memorial, resisting the historicity of archives and gesturing towards the material ephemerality of Theravāda Buddhism, particularly by appropriating Khmer funerary cloths.
The exhibition title — I Miss You More Than I Remember You—is itself a procession of words, sensations, and intimacies, taken from a quote by Vietnamese American writer Ocean Vuong — further articulating the abstraction, dilution, spectrality, and attempt at replicating that which is felt. By de-historicizing mourning and grief through the affective surfaces of Buddhism, this processional installation of objects and media distills postwar intimacies to forestall futurity and renegotiate diasporic belonging.
Text by Sopheak Sam